Heavy quark energy loss and thermalization in hot and dense nuclear matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy quarks lose energy and thermalize in hot, dense nuclear matter, using Langevin dynamics within hydrodynamic models to understand their spectra and flow in quark-gluon plasma.

Contribution

It combines Langevin diffusion with (3+1)-D hydrodynamics to analyze heavy quark behavior in realistic QGP conditions, highlighting the impact of initial geometry and flow.

Findings

Heavy quarks exhibit longer thermalization times than QGP lifetime.

Initial geometric and flow profiles significantly influence heavy quark energy loss.

The study provides insights into heavy flavor meson spectra and elliptic flow in heavy-ion collisions.

Abstract

We study heavy quark energy loss and thermalization in hot and dense nuclear medium. The diffusion of heavy quarks is calculated via a Langevin equation, both for a static medium as well as for a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) medium generated by a (3+1)-dimensional hydrodynamic model. We investigate how the initial configuration of the QGP and its properties affect the final state spectra and elliptic flow of heavy flavor mesons and non-photonic electrons. It is observed that both the geometric anisotropy of the initial profile and the flow profile of the hydrodynamic medium play important roles in the heavy quark energy loss process and the development of elliptic flow. Within our definition of the thermalization criterion and for reasonable values of the diffusion constant, we observe thermalization times that are longer than the lifetime of the QGP phase.